CHAPTER X
Now school was over for another summer and Trimble Cushman's dray couldbe driven at a good wage--by a boy overnight become a man. There werestill carpers who would regard him as a menace to life and limb. JudgePenniman was among these. A large truck in sole charge of a boy--stillin his teens, as the judge put it--was not conducive to publictranquillity. But this element was speedily silenced. The immatureWilbur drove the thing acceptably, though requiring help on the largerboxes of merchandise, and Trimble Cushman, still driving horses on hisother truck, was proud of his employee. Moreover, the boy became in highrepute for his knowledge of the inner mysteries of these new mechanisms.New cars appeared in Newbern every day now, and many of them, developingailments of a character more or less alarming to their purchasers, werebrought to his distinguished notice with results almost uniformlygratifying. He was looked up to, consulted as a specialist, sent for tominister to distant roadside failures, called in the night, respectedand rewarded.
It was a new Newbern through whose thoroughfares the new motor truck ofTrimble Cushman was so expertly propelled. Farm horses still professedthe utmost dismay at sight of vehicles drawn by invisible horses, andtheir owners often sought to block industrial progress by agitation fora law against these things, but progress was triumphant. The chamber ofcommerce recorded immense gains in population. New factories and millshad gone up beside the little river. New people were on the streets orliving in their new houses. New merchants came to meet the new demandfor goods.
The homy little town was putting on airs of a great city. There wasalready a Better Newbern club. The view down River Street from itsjunction with State, Masonic Hall on the left and the new five-storyWhipple block on the right, as preserved on the picture postcards soldby the Cut-Rate Pharmacy, impressed all purchasers with the town'svitality. The _Advance_ appeared twice a week, outdoing its rival, the_Star_, by one issue; and Sam Pickering, ever in the van of progress,was busy with plans for making his journal a daily.
Newbern was coming on, even as boys were coming on from bare feet toshoes on week-days. Ever and again there were traffic jams on RiverStreet, a weaving turmoil of farmers' wagons, buggies, delivery carts,about a noisy, fuming centre of motor vehicles. High in the centre wouldbe the motor truck of Trimble Cushman, loaded with cases and nursedthrough the muddle by a cool, clear-eyed youth, who sat with delicate,sure hands on a potent wheel. Never did he kill or maim either citizenor child, to the secret chagrin of Judge Penniman. Traffic jams to himwere a part of the day's work.
When he had performed for a little time this skilled labour for TrimbleCushman it was brought to him one day that he was old indeed. For heobserved, delivering a box to Rapp Brothers, jewellery, that from thesidewalk before that establishment he was being courted by a small boy;a shy boy with bare feet and freckles who permanently exposed two frontteeth, and who followed the truck to the next place of delivery. Here,when certain boxes had been left, he seated himself, as ifabsentmindedly, upon the remote rear of the truck and was borne toanother stopping place. The truck's driver glanced back savagely at him,but not too savagely; then pretended to ignore him.
The newcomer for an hour hung to the truck leechlike, without winningfurther recognition. Then by insensible gradations, by standing on thetruck bed as it moved, by edging forward toward the high seat, bysilently helping with a weighty box, it seemed he had acquired the rightto mount to the high seat of honour itself. He did this without spokenwords, yet with an ingratiating manner. It was a manner that had beenused, ages back, by the lordly driver of the present truck, when he hadformed alliances with drivers of horse-drawn vehicles. He recognized itas such and turned to regard the courtier with feigned austerity.
"Hello, kid!" he said, with permitting severity. But secretly herejoiced. Now he was really old.
* * * * *
Winona viewed the latest avocation of her charge with little enthusiasm.It compelled a certain measure of her difficult respect, especially whenshe beheld him worm his truck through crowded River Street with asupreme disregard for the imminent catastrophe--which somehow neverensued. But it lacked gentility. At twenty-eight Winona was not onlyperfected in the grammar of morals, more than ever alert for infractionsof the merely social code, but her ideals of refinement and elegance hadbecome more demanding. She would have had the boy engage in a pursuitthat would require clean hands and smart apparel and bring him incontact with people of the right sort. She stubbornly held out to himthe shining possibility that he might one day rise to the pinnacle of aclerical post in the First National Bank.
True, he had never betrayed the faintest promise of qualifying for thiseminence, and his freely voiced preferences sweepingly excluded it fromthe catalogue of occupations in which he might consent to engage. ButWinona was now studying doctrines that put all power in the heart'sdesire. Out of the infinite your own would come to you if you held thethought, and she serenely held the better thought for Wilbur, even inthe moment of mechanical triumphs that brimmed his own cup of desire.She willed him to prefer choicer characters than the roughs he consortedwith, to aspire to genteel occupation that would not send him back atthe day's end grimed, reeking with low odours, and far too hungry.
His exigent appetite, indeed, alarmed her beyond measure, because hecried out for meat, whereas Winona's new books said that meat eaterscould hope for little reward of the spirit. A few simple vegetables,fruits, and nuts--these permitted the soul to expand, to attain harmonywith the infinite, until one came to choose only the best among idealsand human associates. But she learned that she must in this casecompromise, for a boy demanding meat would get it in one place if notanother. If not at the guarded Penniman table, then at the low resortnext to Pegleg McCarron's of one T-bone Tommy, where they commonlydevoured the carcasses of murdered beasts and made no secret of it.
He even rebelled at fabrications, highly extolled in the gospel of cleaneating, which were meant to placate the baser minded by theirresemblances to meat--things like nut turkey and mock veal loaf andleguminous chicken and synthetic beefsteak cooked in pure vegetableoils. These he scorned the more bitterly for their false pretense,demanding plain meat and a lot of it. The nations cited by Winona thathad thrived and grown strong on the produce of the fields left himunimpressed. He merely said, goaded to harshness, that he was not goingto be a Chinese laundryman for any one.
Of what avail to read the lyrics of a great Hindu vegetarian poet tothis undeveloped being? Still Winona laboured unceasingly to bring lightto the dark place. Teaching a public school for eight years haddeveloped a substratum of granite determination in her character. Shewould never quit. She was still to the outer eye the slight, brownWinona of twenty--perky, birdlike, with the quick trimness of a wingingswallow, a little sharper featured perhaps, but superior in acuteness ofdesire and persistence, and with some furtive, irresponsible girlishnesslurking timorously back in her bright glance.
She still secretly relished the jesting address of Dave Cowan, when atlong intervals he lingered in Newbern from cross-country flights. Itthrilled her naughtily to be addressed as La Marquise, to be accused ofgoings-on at the court of Louis XVIII, about which the less said thebetter. She had never brought herself to wear the tan silk stockings ofinvidious allure, and she still confined herself to her mother'splainest dressmaking, yearning secretly for the fancy kind, but neverwith enough daring. Lyman Teaford still came of an evening to play hisflute acceptably, while Winona accompanied him in many an amorousmorceau. Lyman, in the speech of Newbern, had for eight years been goingwith Winona. But as the romantically impatient and sometimes a bitsnappish Mrs. Penniman would say, he had never gone far.
* * * * *
Winona rejoiced a year later when golf promised, at least for a summer,to snatch Wilbur Cowan from the grimy indistinction of a mechanic'scareer. For thriving and aspiring Newbern had eased one of its growingpains with a veritable golf course, and the whilom machinery enthusiastbecame sm
itten with this strange new sport. Winona rejoiced, because itwould bring him into contact with people of the better sort, for ofcourse only these played the game. Her charge, it is true, engaged inthe sport as a business, and not as one seeking recreation, but thedesired social contact was indubitable. To carry over the course a bagor two of clubs for the elect of Newbern was bound to be improving.
And it was true that he now consorted daily through a profitable summerwith people who had heretofore been but names to him. But Winona hadneglected to observe that he would meet them not as a social equal butas a hireling. This was excusable in her, because she had only thevaguest notions of golf or of the interrelations between caddie andplayer. One informed in the ways of the sport could have warned her thatcaddies inevitably become cynical toward all people of the sort onecares to meet. Compelled by a rigid etiquette to silent, unemotionalformality, they boil interiorly with contempt for people of the bettersort, not only because their golf is usually atrocious--such as everycaddie brilliantly surpasses in his leisure moments--but because thespeech provoked by their inveterate failures is commonly all too human.
So the results of Wilbur Cowan's contact with people Winona wouldapprove, enduring for a mercifully brief summer and autumn, were notwhat Winona had fondly preconceived. He had first been attracted to thecourse--a sweet course, said the golf-architect who had laid it out overthe rolling land south of town--by the personality of one John KnoxMcTavish, an earnest Scotchman of youngish middle age, procured fromafar to tell the beginning golfers of Newbern to keep their heads downand follow through and not to press the ball. As John spoke, it was"Don't pr-r-r-r-ess th' ball." He had been chosen from among othercandidates because of his accent. He richly endowed his words with r's,making more than one grow where only one had grown before. It was thisvocal burriness that drew the facile notice of Wilbur. He delighted tohear John McTavish talk, and hung about the new clubhouse, apparentlywithout purpose, until John not only sanctioned but besought hispresence, calling him Laddie and luring him with tales of the monstrousgains amassed by competent caddies.
The boy lingered, though from motives other than mercenary. His cup wasfull when he could hear John's masterful voice addressed to Mrs. Rapp,Junior, or another aspirant.
"R-r-remember, mum, th' ar-r-r-um close, th' head down--and don'tpr-r-r-ress th' ball."
Yet he was presently allured by a charm even more imperious, the charmof the game itself. For John at odd moments would teach him the use ofthose strange weapons, so that he had the double thrill of standingunder the torrential r's addressed to himself and of feeling the sharp,clean impact of the club head upon a ball that flew a surprisingdistance. His obedient young muscles soon conformed to the few masterlaws of the game. He kept down, followed through and forebore, againstall human instinct, to press the ball.
By the end of Newbern's golfing season he was able to do almostunerringly what so many of Newbern's better sort did erratically and atintervals. And the talk of John Knox McTavish about the wealth accruingto alert caddies had proved to be not all fanciful. In addition to thestipend earned for conventional work, there were lost balls in abundanceto be salvaged and resold.
"Laddie," said John McTavish, "if I but had the lost-ball pur-r-rivilegeof yon sweet courr-r-se and could insu-r-r-e deliver-r-r-y!"
For the better sort of Newbern, despite conscientious warnings for whichthey paid John McTavish huge sums, would insist upon pressing the ballin the face of constant proof that thus treated it would slice into therough to cuddle obscurely at the roots of tall grass.
Wilbur Cowan became a shrewd hunter and a successful merchandiser ofgolf balls but slightly used. Newbern's better sort denounced thescandal of this, but bought of him clandestinely, for even in that farday, when golf balls in price were yet within reach of the commonpeople, few of them liked to buy a new ball and watch it vanish foreverafter one brilliant drive that would have taken it far down the fairwayexcept for the unaccountable slice.
* * * * *
On the whole his season was more profitable than that of the yearbefore, when he had nursed the truck of Trimble Cushman through thetraffic jams of River Street, and he was learning more about the worldof men if less about gas engines. Especially did the new sport put himinto closer contact with old Sharon Whipple. Having first denounced thegolf project as a criminal waste of one hundred and seventy-five acresof prime arable land, Sharon had loitered about the scene of the crimeto watch the offenders make a certain kind of fools of themselves. Fromthe white bench back of the first tee this cynic would rejoicemirthfully at topped or sliced drives or the wild swing that spends allits vicious intent upon the imponderable air. His presence came to be atrial to beginning players, who took no real pleasure in the game untilthey reached the second tee, beyond the ken of the scoffer.
But this was perilous sport for Sharon Whipple. Day after day, lookinginto the whirlpool, he was--in a moment of madness--himself to leap overthe brink. On an afternoon had come his brother Gideon and Rapp, Senior,elated pupils of John McTavish, to play sportingly for half a ball ahole. They ignored certain preliminary and all-too-pointed comments ofthe watcher. They strode gallantly to the tee in turn and exhibited theadmirable form taught them by John. They took perfect practice swings.They addressed the ball ceremoniously, waggled the club at it, firstsoothingly, then with distinct menace, looked up to frown at a spot fardown the fairway, looked back, exhaled the breath, and drove. Rapp,Senior, sliced into the rough. Gideon Whipple hooked into the rough.
Sharon Whipple mocked them injuriously. His ironic shouts attracted thenotice of arriving players. Gideon Whipple stayed placid, smilinggrimly, but Rapp, Senior, was nettled to retort.
"Mebbe you could do a whole lot better!" he called to Sharon in tonesunnecessarily loud.
Sharon's reply, in a voice eminently soothing and by that calculatedfurther to irritate the novice, was in effect that Rapp, Senior, mightsafely wager his available assets that Sharon Whipple could do better.
"Well, come on and do it then if you're so smart!" urged Rapp, Senior."Come on, once--I dare you!"
Sharon scorned--but rather weakly--the invitation. Secretly, through hishostile study of the game, he had convinced himself that he by divineright could do perfectly what these people did so clumsily. Again andagain his hands had itched for the club as he watched futile drives. Heknew he could hit the ball. He couldn't help hitting it, stuck up theway it was on a pinch of sand--stuck up like a sore thumb. How did theymiss it time after time? He had meant to test his conviction insolitude, but why not put it to trial now, and shame this doubting andinept Rapp, Senior?
"Oh, well, I don't mind," he said, and waddled negligently to the tee.
Rapp, Senior, voiced loud delight. Gideon Whipple merely stood safelyback without comment, though there was a malicious waiting gleam in hiseyes.
"You folks make something out of nothing," scolded Sharon, fussily.
Grasping the proffered club he severely threatened with it the new ballwhich Rapp, Senior, had obligingly teed up for him. In that moment hefelt a quick strange fear, little twinges of doubt, a suspicion that allwas not well. Perhaps the sudden hush of those about him conduced tothis. Even newly arrived players in the background waited in silence.Then he recovered his confidence. There was the ball and there was theclub--it was easy, wasn't it? Make a mountain out of a mole hill, wouldthey? He'd show them!
Amid the hanging silence--like a portent it overhung him--he raised thestrange weapon and brought it gruntingly down with all the strength ofhis stout muscles.
* * * * *
In the fading light of seven o'clock on that fair summer's evening JohnMcTavish for the hundredth time seized the heavy arms of Sharon Whippleand bent them back and up in the right line. Then Sharon did the thingfaithfully in his own way, which was still, after an hour's trial, notthe way of John McTavish.
"Mon, what have I told ye?" expostulated John. He had quit callingSharo
n Sir-r-r. Perhaps his r's were tired, and anyway, Sharon calledhim Sandy, being unable to believe that any Scotchman would not havethis for one or another of his names. "Again I tell ye, th' body mustbend between th' hips an' th' neck, but ye keep jer-r-rkin' the head tolook up."
"But, Sandy, I've sprained my back trying to bend from the hips,"protested the plaintive Sharon.
"Yer-r-r old car-r-r-cass is musclebound, to be sur-r-e," concededJohn. "You can't hope to bend it the way yon laddie does." He pointed toWilbur Cowan, who had been retrieving balls--from no great distance--hitout by the neophyte.
"Can he do it?" questioned Sharon.
"Show 'um!" ordered John.
And Wilbur Cowan, coming up for the driver, lithely bent to send threeballs successively where good golf players should always send them.Sharon blinked at this performance, admiring, envious, and againhopeful. If a child could do this thing----
"Well, I ain't giving up," he declared. "I'll show some people beforeI'm through."
He paused, hearing again in his shamed ears the ironic laughter of Rapp,Senior, at the three wild swings he had made before--in an excess ofcaution--he had struck the ground back of the immune ball and raked it apitiful five feet to one side. He heard, too, the pleased laughter inthe background, high, musical peals of tactless women and thefull-throated roars of brutal men. He felt again the hot flush on hischeeks as he had slunk from the dreadful scene with a shamed effort tobrazen it out, followed by the amused stare of Gideon Whipple. And hehad slunk back when the course was cleared, to be told the simple secretof hitting a golf ball. He would condescend to that for the sake, on anear day, of publicly humiliating a certain vainglorious jewellerydealer. But apparently now, while the secret was simple enough totell--it took John McTavish hardly a score of burry words to tell itall--it was less simple to demonstrate. It might take him three or evenfour days.
"Ye've done gr-r-rand f'r-r a beginnerr-r," said John McTavish, wearily,perfunctorily.
"I'll tell you," said Sharon. "I ain't wanting this to get out on me,that I come sneaking back here to have you teach me the silly game."
"Mon, mon!" protested the hurt McTavish.
"So why can't Buck here come up and teach me in private? There's openspace back of the stables."
"Ye cud do wor-r-rse," said John. "And yer-r-r full hour-r-'s lesson nowwill be two dollar-r-rs."
"Certainly, McTavish," said Sharon, concealing his amazement. He couldno longer address as Sandy one who earned two dollars as lightly asthis.
There was a spacious opening back of the stable on the Whipple OldPlace--space and the seclusion which Sharon Whipple consideredimperative. Even Elihu Titus was sent about his business when he came toobserve; threatened with an instant place in the ranks of the unemployedif he so much as breathed of the secret lessons to a town now said to becomposed of snickering busybodies. The open space immediately back ofthe stable gave on wider spaces of pasture and wood lot.